| I had a similar problem previously and considered automating it by comparing frames. It's not easy and would have obvious false positives/negatives, but YouTube does help by publishing key frames and it could at least be used to help rank results. Take this example music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vopR3ys8Kw Frames: https://img.youtube.com/vi/6vopR3ys8Kw/0.jpg https://img.youtube.com/vi/6vopR3ys8Kw/1.jpg https://img.youtube.com/vi/6vopR3ys8Kw/2.jpg https://img.youtube.com/vi/6vopR3ys8Kw/3.jpg And this lyrics video version (more interesting because it's SOMEWHAT changing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoAqHxm5dpo Frames: https://img.youtube.com/vi/FoAqHxm5dpo/0.jpg https://img.youtube.com/vi/FoAqHxm5dpo/1.jpg https://img.youtube.com/vi/FoAqHxm5dpo/2.jpg https://img.youtube.com/vi/FoAqHxm5dpo/3.jpg Simply finding the differences between frames would give the first video a higher score than the second. |
Nice catch on the thumbnails that YouTube already captures. A histogram comparison between the second and third auto-generated thumbnails from the lyrics video was mostly equivalent when I ran one. That would be a good sign that it's not the actual music video.